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Trying to figure out Romney's footprint

By Michael Goldman

Updated:
11/13/2012 01:23:30 PM EST

Which America will emerge on the day after the election?

When the votes are counted on Tuesday, it is possible that like the 2000 presidential campaign, one candidate will end up winning the popular vote while the other candidate will be elected president by securing the majority of votes in the Electoral College.

At best, the winning candidate might also squeeze out a small majority of the popular vote along with his Electoral College victory.

Either way, like in 1960 and 1968, this election will hardly be a landslide for the winning candidate.

Given the clear and massive fundamental differences in the ideological and cultural values between the two candidates and the two major political parties, the question can fairly be posited as to what the election of either one will mean to our nation in the near future and long term.

Some things are quite clear.

If Obama is re-elected, the next justice he appoints to the Supreme Court will most assuredly be a vote to retain Roe v. Wade; a vote that overturns DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act); a vote sympathetic to expanding gay rights; a vote that makes equal pay for equal work a constitutional right; and a vote that will overturn both the recently sanctioned concept that "money equals speech" (Citizens United) as well as a vote to reverse the idea that the Second Amendment term "well regulated militia" refers to the gun rights of the individual citizen.

If Romney is elected, he forcefully has stated he intends to appoint justices who favor a reading of the Constitution identical to those of current justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, all of whom are on the opposite side of the issues identified above.

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The truth is more than any single issue debated during a presidential campaign. The real footprints of presidents are the justices they leave behind, many of whom remain in power deciding cases 10, 20, or even 30 years after the president who appointed them has been dumped into the dustbin of history.

Other things are less clear, especially if Romney were to win.

Whether one likes President Obama or not, one has a pretty good fix of the kind of president he will be.

Not so Romney.

He is like a multicolored spectrum that allows two different people to look at it from two different angles and see two very different arrays of colors at the same time.

The very real question is which Romney colors from his political spectrum will show up on Jan. 21, 2013, the "severely conservative" one who campaigned with right-wing passion during the Republican primary, or the "moderate Mitt" who emerged reborn like a biblical Lazarus or a science-fiction shape-shifter during the first presidential debate?

Will the Romney who gets elected be the one who'll "wipe out Obamacare" and return health-care issues to the states, or will he be the Romney who'll "retain the parts I like" whether the states like it or not?

Will Romney support the repeal of Rowe v. Wade in its entirety, as his party and his vice president want, or will he care enough to use his limited political capital to save the exceptions of rape, incest or the health and life of the mother he says he supports?

Will Romney stay on course and remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2014, or will he listen to the George W. Bush neo-cons who serve as his military braintrust and instead get us mired in a new conflict in Syria or Iran?

Will Romney really implement strict oversight regulations on big financial institutions and Wall Street, or will the payback to his biggest financial supporters instead be a return to the laissez faire policies that got us into the second worst economic collapse in the history of the nation?

In the end, the ultimate victory of Barack Obama may have less to do with where he stands on issues, and more with the reality in the end too many voters have no idea where Romney really stands on any of them.

Michael Goldman is a senior consultant for the Government Insight Group in Boston.

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